Lisa Favicchia
On the way to the doctor, Father glanced at me with one, oblong pupil and I chanced a look back from beneath thick bangs that grew thicker every time my mom cut them, allowing titmouses and blue jays to carry away a little more chestnut to build their nests with. Father slammed on the brakes when the vehicle in front of us lurched and a deer, a large antlered buck, burst through its rear window and tumbled lifeless, my father said, until it stopped just beneath our scorched brake pads, his trailer jackknifed. Father got out, said stay, and went to the small pea-green car. Hair, silvered and frizzed, sat in shock at the wheel, over and over saying it's still in the car, it's still in the car. Father pulled her out, clammy and broken, and sat her on the gravelly shoulder. When he reached back inside past the front seat for her purse, he saw the black hoof and muscular, blood-blown thigh. An ambulance probably came, but I'd only remember so many sunken eyes. That night I dreamed I met a buck in the marsh, staring at me with its many-tiered horns. It hooked the lowest bough around a mossy slippery elm and pulled the spiny antler from his head to land in beds of orange pine before lifting it with his soft, whiskered mouth, extending his neck gently toward me, waiting for my open hand. I spent the next day rearranging square-cut box nails of varying lengths that had jumped into the wrong drawers, pulling CU 5 slims from size 6 city-heads, and fishing Capewell 4.5 racers from Mustads. Years later my father would ask if I remembered organizing his trailer, saying that was his favorite story to tell his friends, what a good job I did.